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In November 1961, the residents of West Berlin woke to find their city dotted with posters. These, in scabrous drawings and words, attacked contemporary German art as a thing of “anthropomorphic, pot-bellied putty-rocks”. Baffled Berliners who made it to the end of the text found an advertisement for an exhibition of work by the posters’ twin authors. One was a painter called Eugen Schönebeck, who was to remain little known outside Germany. The other was Georg Baselitz, later a star of the international art world, who has died aged 88.

The posters comprised both an artwork and a manifesto. Called Pandemonium I (Pandemonium II, released three months later, self-defeatingly observed that “all writing [was] crap”), it came at a charged moment in German history. The Berlin Wall had gone up shortly before. Politically as historically, Germany was split in two – East and West, and before 1945 and after. For artists, these divisions went together. By 1961, prewar German art, even if untainted by nazism, was off limits. In its place was American abstraction, the style of the victor.

Raised in the new East Germany and wary of what he called “correct ways” of painting, Baselitz rejected this US dominance. Expressionism, loathed by the Nazis, had been the art of German rebellion: after Pandemonium, he set out to reclaim it. The notoriety this project brought him made Baselitz a lodestar of German art for the next half century.

Born in the Saxon village of Deutschbaselitz, Hans-Georg Kern – he took the name of his home town while working on Pandemonium – was a German everyman. Raised over the primary schoolhouse where his father, Johannes, was headteacher, young Georg hid in the building’s basement with his mother, Lieselotte (nee Block), as invading Russian soldiers flattened it. Johannes was away fighting at the front. In old age, Baselitz would describe the distant glow of a burning Dresden; the city was still smouldering when he and his mother walked through the streets days later, pushing their possessions in a handcart. “The dead, the half-dead, [were] everywhere,” he remembered. “No one … ever said: ‘The British did that,’ because everyone knew we were guilty.”

Hoping to reach American-occupied Bavaria, the Kerns found themselves trapped instead in the future GDR. At home they lived hand to mouth, often foraging for food. The assimilation of found scraps would define Baselitz’s painting to the end of his life – these were to include body parts, bleeding stumps, amputated hands. “Everyone nowadays has all … they need,” he said in his 70s. “I had nothing, we had nothing.”

Worse, such cultural references as were allowed at East Berlin’s Academy of Fine and Applied Arts, where he had enrolled as a student at the age of 18, had been officially censored. Baselitz, balking at this, was expelled for “sociopolitical immaturity”. As was possible pre-Wall, he moved to the Hochschule der Künste in West Berlin, there falling under the predictable spell of Jackson Pollock and Philip Guston.

Like Guston, but a decade before him, Baselitz began a return to the human form. Figure-painting in 60s America was merely unfashionable; in Germany, it was historicist, and thus seditious. When, two years after Pandemonium, Baselitz’s first one-man exhibition included a work called Die Grosse Nacht im Eimer (Big Night Down the Drain, 1963), viewers were scandalised not only by the work’s subject – the artist, lifesize and dolefully masturbating – but by its echoes of the prewar realism of the neue sachlichkeit (new objectivity) movement.

To Baselitz’s delight, the show was raided by police and his self-portrait confiscated. Yet, like George Grosz and Otto Dix before him, Baselitz’s aim was the very opposite of Nazi bombast. His interest lay not in heroes, but in anti-heroes – man not simply as poor, forked and bare, but lonely, sad and stupid.

In 1969, this creature found its perfect expression in the first of Baselitz’s trademark upside-down figures, Der Mann am Baum (Man in a Tree). Such pictures were painted the wrong way up, rather than being made as normal and then inverted. To underline their lack of heroism, later examples were titled Helden (Heroes). With his army of Teutonic woodsmen, stags and eagles that followed over the next 50 years, Baselitz upended not only his images but a painter’s normal way of working. He, like the images he made, inhabited an upside-down world.

In 1962, he married Elke Kretzschmar, who became his muse, adviser and, from 1969, the most frequent subject of his portraits. (Most, naturally, were painted the wrong way up.) If some critics mocked Baselitz’s upended images as allegorically heavy-handed, they nonetheless sold. Now with two sons, he and Elke moved, in 1975, to a castle near Hanover. In this Wagnerian setting, Baselitz made the work that first brought him to international attention.

Called Modell für eine Skulptur (Model for a Sculpture), this was shown in the German pavilion of the 1980 Venice Biennale. Based on a traditional west African carving, the work’s monumental figure horrified viewers by seeming to give the Hitlergruss, the stiff-armed Nazi salute. Baselitz professed himself shocked at their shock. “It never occurred to me that my sculpture was doing a Hitler salute,” he later said, possibly truthfully. “But when a German TV channel reported on it, they played the Horst-Wessel-Lied [the Nazi anthem] to accompany their story.” Within a week, offers of shows were pouring from around the world.

With this experience in mind, Baselitz’s paintings of the next 20 years became both more sculptural and more monumental. One, called simply 45 (1989), was made up of 20 full-sized canvases painted in deep impasto. When these were shown at Pace in New York in 2010, they took up the entire gallery. This, predictably, led to accusations of Teutonic giantism, a criticism also levelled at the outsized work of his compatriot and contemporary Anselm Kiefer. Complaining of anti-German prejudice, Baselitz claimed often to feel that “people were standing over [him]” as he worked. And yet it was just such prejudices, and his challenging of them, that formed the bedrock of his career.

Conversely, forgiveness brought problems of its own. As the word “German” came to have less dire associations in the 21st century, Baselitz sometimes seemed lost for new ways to provoke. Elected an honorary academician of the Royal Academy in 1999, in 2007 he was given a full RA retrospective. Clearly, new shock tactics were needed. In 2016, in the Financial Times, Baselitz noted that he had driven past “a queue of homeless people in hoodies” on the way to his London gallery, White Cube Bermondsey, before adding that any artist foolish enough to show social concern in his work would be “lost”. Three years earlier he had suggested to a (female) interviewer from Der Spiegel that “women simply [don’t] pass the test” as artists. When his interlocutor, goggle-eyed, challenged him on this view, Baselitz cheerily added: “Women don’t paint very well. It’s a fact.”

Squibs such as these –which he doubled down on in later years – were not borne out by the evident skill and intelligence of his work, nor by his own marriage. Together for more than 60 years, the Baselitzes, Elke said, were “like two old apes picking the fleas from each other’s fur”. After the castle near Hanover, they moved to a mansion on a lake outside Munich designed by Herzog and de Meuron, and then to Salzburg. In 2022, Baselitz showed a series of new paintings of his wife at the White Cube Hong Kong. Called Sofabilder (“sofa pictures”), these rendered Elke’s ageing body as a series of white-on-black splodges, faintly reminiscent of X-rays. If the frankness of these seemed brutal, that was not their intention. In old age, he was appalled that Jeff Koons should have painted pornographic images of himself and his wife making love. “The fact that he made those paintings while at the same time talking about love and fathering a child!” he harrumphed. “I think it’s dreadful.”

He continued to work and exhibit until shortly before his death, most recently in a one-man show called George Baselitz: Feet First at the Munch museum, Oslo, in 2025.

• Georg Baselitz (Hans-Georg Kern), artist, born 23 January 1938; died 30 April 2026